Stick a fork in SCO - it's done

Pity poor SCO. Once the leading vendor of respected Unix products such as SCO Unix, it has now been reduced to a desperate bid for survival by pinning its hopes to a bunch of lawyers. It's ill-fated attempt to feather its nest by suing IBM, Novell, Chrysler, and anyone else who even had thought about Linux, has left it at near Death's Door.

So far SCO has fared no better in the courtroom than it did in the marketplace. 2006 was an especially bad year which saw most of its lawsuits either entirely dismissed or major parts of them summarily dismissed. Then, to make matters worse, Novell countersued SCO on the basis that SCO didn't have the right to enforce its patents and copyrights because they never bought them from Novell in the first place.

Now Novell claims that SCO is just about bankrupt, never paid the licensing fees it still owes to Novell, and should pay now. SCO claims that it can't afford to while it's still suing IBM. And to top if off, the judge in the IBM case won't let that case proceed until Novell and SCO's case to decide who owns what is done.

Meanwhile, SCO slowly bleeds dollars to its legal team.

With a dwindling market share, almost no revenue, and little hope of legal victory, what's left for SCO? Not much.

One would think after all the ire and angst drummed up by the open source community over the SCO lawsuits in the first place, that Novell would be viewed the hero here. Without Novell's attack on SCO, many of the copyright infringement suits would possibly still be open to debate. In the end, Novell should wind up owning the rights to Unix again, while SCO dries up and blows away.